Back and Forth

After staying at uni the week after my birthday, I caught the train home on Friday evening for two very special occasions. First of all, it was Patch’s 18th birthday on the Sunday, so I wanted to see him and give him his present (a tweed tie to match his tweed jacket. He and his friends have a ‘tie-day Friday’ at sixth form where they go in wearing ties, so I thought it was the perfect present. Thankfully he agreed and it went down very well. I’m not usually very good at present choosing, so I was very pleased with this one!).

The second reason for going home last weekend was because Heather and Tiny Tin Bird came to visit! I had been looking forward to this for SOOOOO long! I’d only met TTB once before, a few days after he was born and that was only for two hours because of the visiting hours in hospital. I was meant to be seeing a band play at uni on the Friday night, but it got cancelled so I quickly hopped on the train after lectures and met Rachel in town for coffee after she’d finished work. We got the bus home together, walked in the door and there they were – a snuggly little baby TTB huggled up to his gorgeous mum.

It’s amazing how much you learn about babies after spending even just a few hours with one. I’ve never really been around babies for a prolonged period of time, so didn’t really know how to handle them much. I’m so grateful to Heather for being comfortable with me holding him and learning how to put on nappies and button up his clothes (even if I did forget to button up his vest under his onesie once. Oops…). After a little guidance, I’m now completely happy picking him up and rocking him, walking with him and drying him after a bath. This may all sound very silly – why would I want to know how to do a nappy up at my age? But I’ve always love babies and FINALLY I have one around that I can learn to look after. I love doing all these things, and I’m glad I do because between me, Rachel and my mum, I think we gave Heather a bit of a break. Me and Rachel took TTB out for a few walks when he wanted to sleep but couldn’t quite send himself off. His pram is so nice to push around!

On Sunday afternoon, our kind-of-cousin came over to visit with her husband and 9 month (?) old baby. It was so lovely to see them and very comical watching the babies trying to figure each other out. They weren’t quite sure what to make of each other! It all felt very Christmas-y while I was home because the whole family was there and we did a lot of sitting in pyjamas (mostly because TTB likes to dribble/vomit, so nice clothes were out of the question!) and cooing over the baby. The days just seemed to whiz past and all we did was fight over whose turn it was to hold TTB and twiddle our thumbs while he was napping!

One of the best things about having a baby in the house is that they like to go to bed early. Heather goes to bed at the same time as TTB at the moment, so at about 8pm all that could be heard was the TV and a few lullabies coming from her bedroom. As it gets dark so early on in the evenings now, by the time they go to bed it feels like it’s about 10pm, so we all start feeling tired and are generally in bed before 10! It’s great! The only problem with this is that all of my uni friends are on a different time scale, where you go to bed at 12:30pm and wake up at 10am, which means that I kept getting woken up by texts at 10:30 and 11:00 when all I wanted to do was sleep! There’s also a kind of necessity to going to bed early when TTB is around, because usually if I wake up early (aka, 8am), I would just roll over and go back to sleep, but if he’s there I wake up and think TTB’S HERE!! I MUST GO AND NUZZLE HIS NECK AND KISS HIS FOREHEAD AT ONCE!!!! It’s really a very strong urge to ignore, so I end up getting up in search of the poor child who must be exhausted by all of this attention he’s been getting.

I drove back to uni on Monday evening to go to a pizza night at my friends’ house and then spent Tuesday day working on a lab report (boring!) before going to watch my friend sing in a choir and then go to an acoustic evening at the campus pub. It was a really nice evening actually, apart from being entirely disappointed by the mulled cider on offer. I’ve only got one module going on at the moment, so am only in lectures for three hours in a week – I don’t know how this happened, last year I was in for about 23! This means that as soon as my lectures finish tomorrow, I’m scooting back home again to spend the last few days of Heather and TTB’s visit there. I’m so excited to see them again, it’s amazing how much you can miss people when you only saw them a few days ago!

It’s so nice seeing Heather as a mum, and my parents as grandparents and all of us as aunties and uncles. It seems to have made everyone that much happier and there’s a certain calmness in the air as we all just sit and watch TTB kick about on his play mat, or have his tummy tickled, or be rocked to sleep.

Post navigation

2 Comments

Hi Alice I’m just being nosey so feel free to tell me where to go but I just wondered why your dad never features in your posts? You mum does quite a bit along with your sisters and TTB… ANyway nosey-ness aside, glad you had a good time getting to know TTB 🙂